Addressing Address as SEO Issue

Can an address make or break a business?

I recently spoke with a comrade in the web development field and we were having a great conversation about how business was running and everything seemed to be well except his website was not ranking well in his city. Now we had done a lot of work on this and he had been a member of SkyPoint’s SEO Club Program to help him and he said that he noticed that a lot of his clients were getting a bump in search results because of the program but that his website had not really increased in rankings much.

He is in a very competitive large metropolitan city and therefore we just kind of figured that he must have to do more work in order to get ahead in search such as more content and more backlinks. Of course this was somewhat frustrating to him because he had worked very hard for the past several years and had even recently redone his website again and he felt like this was one of his best work yet and that he should be getting better rankings.

So I decided to delve a little deeper into what might be the problem. I asked him, “do you have a prominent business orientated address for your website design business?” He said “well, what do you mean by that?” I said “is your address in an area that’s well known to Google as being for businesses, preferably businesses that have been established for 25 plus years?” He said “well yeah, I do, it’s at the local UPS Store.”

He says funny that you mention it because when I was talking to the Google AdWords representative, he said that I can no longer use it to register my business and that I would have to change it. I explained to him it’s because Google is no longer recognizing UPS addresses as relevant business addresses. I then went on to explain to him that this was the main source of his issues with ranking for SEO.

You see, Google is looking for addresses to reverse-engineer the quality of a business. They don’t have anyone there locally on the ground to go figure out your business, so they’re using your address in correlation to businesses around your address to figure out how reliable and how relevant your business is to the city that you do business in. Then they use this data to rank your business website against other competitors in the same city.

So if you have a UPS address and your competitor has an address on Main Street next to businesses that have been around for 50 plus years, they will most likely outrank you in search if everything else on the websites are pretty much identical. I told him that this is the number one thing that he needs to think about for his business to rank higher in search.

It’s crucial to find a location where you can rent out that gives you a prominent address. In this large city that he resides in, I recommended he find somewhere downtown in the business district and rent out a small office or even just rent share the address itself as there are businesses that let you rent just the address. This will give him the desirable address that he needs in order to be competitive against other businesses in the local area.

Of course he will need to register this address with Google and get the postcard in the mail and put in the code once he received the postcard. Also he will need to update the address on all of his different profiles: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yellow Pages, Etc. You can view our whole list of Top 50 Free Business Listings.

Once this has been completed, he would need to wait at least 6 months for it to fully take place and settle into the search engines systems. After that time, he should be able to put in web design in the city that he’s in and see that he is now ranking at a much higher level than he was before.

This is a big deal when it comes to the success of a businesses website. Many business owners don’t think about how their address plays into their value online. Now many businesses with well established locations, this isn’t going to make much of a difference. However, with service-based businesses, they can certainly overlook the fact that they don’t have an office or don’t have an address that is on a prominent business-related street.

Now some service businesses will choose not to list an address because they work out of their home. I can understand the desire not to list your address, but if you are at all possibly comfortable with doing so, it can be very beneficial to just go ahead and list your home address as your business address. It’s not going to give you as much credit as an address in an established business area, but it will give you a lot more Google credit then no address at all.

Have questions about your business address and how it relates to your online success? Hit us up on our contact form or call us at 406-208-8733.

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Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone

Jophiel Silvestrone has written 161 posts in the Tech Blog.

Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12.
He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios. One of his favorite jobs though, is fathering his 11-year old son Jaoquin. "JJ" also loves technology.